SuperQuadricOcc: Multi-Layer Gaussian Approximation of Superquadrics for Real-Time Self-Supervised Occupancy Estimation (2511.17361v1)

Abstract: Semantic occupancy estimation enables comprehensive scene understanding for automated driving, providing dense spatial and semantic information essential for perception and planning. While Gaussian representations have been widely adopted in self-supervised occupancy estimation, the deployment of a large number of Gaussian primitives drastically increases memory requirements and is not suitable for real-time inference. In contrast, superquadrics permit reduced primitive count and lower memory requirements due to their diverse shape set. However, implementation into a self-supervised occupancy model is nontrivial due to the absence of a superquadric rasterizer to enable model supervision. Our proposed method, SuperQuadricOcc, employs a superquadric-based scene representation. By leveraging a multi-layer icosphere-tessellated Gaussian approximation of superquadrics, we enable Gaussian rasterization for supervision during training. On the Occ3D dataset, SuperQuadricOcc achieves a 75\% reduction in memory footprint, 124\% faster inference, and a 5.9\% improvement in mIoU compared to previous Gaussian-based methods, without the use of temporal labels. To our knowledge, this is the first occupancy model to enable real-time inference while maintaining competitive performance. The use of superquadrics reduces the number of primitives required for scene modeling by 84\% relative to Gaussian-based approaches. Finally, evaluation against prior methods is facilitated by our fast superquadric voxelization module. The code will be released as open source.